FSCM, Financial Supply Chain Management looks at the key points in the process chain for cash flow. It adds a further level of detail to enable the users to make better decisions so that customers pay quicker and have fewer invoices in Dispute. Record and case management is used to enable credit limit request processes to be built, promises to pay and disputes. There is also the ability to score customers for credit risk and to use a score to enable Worklists to be created for the collections team.

Our technical offering of the solution is broken down into four products:

• SAP Biller Direct: for handling Web-based payments and account and bill display
• SAP Dispute Management: for processing customer invoice complaints
• SAP Collections Management: for proactively collecting outstanding receivables
• SAP Credit Management: for managing customer credit lines

All of these products are modular and so can be used either in isolation or together

Key Benefits

The above diagram indicates the progress that has been made in the Order to Cash cycle. The progress has stalled at the cash collection part of the process. By reducing the amount of time it takes to collect the cash benefits can be achieved in reducing the cash flow for an organisation. By making more informed decisions as to which customers to give credit to and setting the correct credit limit is the first stage. Followed with a more precise Collections Strategy enables you to optimise your staff, leading to a more unified process. The implementation of Biller Direct allows your customers to view their account on line. This will enable them to raise disputes, update disputes, and potentially even make direct debit payments. Lastly being able to record disputes, workflow them through the business and have access to them when you are collecting your cash, provides not only a professional approach with your customers but will lead to a quicker response time to resolve disputes. All four of these products can be used together to speed up the cash collection process and improve your cash flow.

What is our approach?

• Meet with Client
• Work out their needs
• Define which products they should go for
• Explain the benefits of the products and any integration issues
• Put together a project plan, outlining timeframes, benefits, milestones and achievables
• Start project
• Hold business workshops
• Create test solution and demo
• Get business Integration and User Acceptance
• Sign off on solution
• Revisit solution after period of time to make sure the benefits expected have been delivered.

What are Bluefin offering?

Bluefin, together with SAP are looking at offering a complete solution for FSCM. There are 6 parts to FSCM. As a partnership we would look to see what products would add benefit to the client and work out what those benefits were and how they could be monitored.

In terms of the solution we offer a consulting implementation service with knowledge transfer back to the client at a detailed level. In terms of workflow and business processes these would need to be defined and worked on before the build stage takes place.